Governance: An international journal of policy, administration and institutions

The cost of corruption: capacity loss more than monetary loss

In the current issue of Governance (24.3, July 2011), Adam Graycar and Diego Villa report on a study of one hundred successfully prosecuted corruption cases in New York City. Although in some cases there was a significant monetary loss to the city because of corrupt activity, the larger difficulty, they find, is the loss of governance capacity — mainly through the undermining of regulatory processes designed to protect health and safety and promote sound planning. Most of the corrupt conduct in these cases involved low risks, and also low rewards. Graycar and Villa find that there are multiple interventions that could discourage corrupt activity by altering the risk-reward calculus. Read the article .